Pirate Bay fools the system with cloud technology

Despite years of persecution, the world’s most notorious pirated content exchange continues to flout copyright laws worldwide. The Pirate Bay team revealed how cloud technology made their service’s virtual servers truly invulnerable.

Two founders of The Pirate Bay (TPB) file exchange are in
prison, but their creation continues to
receive millions of unique visitors daily and remains among the
100 most popular websites worldwide.

Today The Pirate Bay has 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) scattered
around the globe with cloud-hosting providers, and the new setup
works just fine, reported TorrentFreak, having anonymously
questioned the Pirate Bay team. The cloud technology made the
site more portable, eliminated the need for any crucial pieces of
hardware and therefore made the torrent harder to take down.
Costs have decreased and better uptime is now guaranteed.

True geeks cannot follow up hardware and server setup anymore,
but the advantages of the new tech set-up for the notorious
torrent site outweigh any inconveniences.

After operating ‘in exile’ in Guyana and Peru without much luck, two
years ago The Pirate Bay team made a landmark decision and decided to move away from operating
physical servers and switched all of their operations to the
cloud.

Two years ago there were just four VMs, but the increased traffic
has heralded a five-fold growth of virtual machines.

Out of 21 VMs, eight are busy serving web pages. Six machines are
processing the searches, while TPB’s database is being run on two
VMs. The remaining five VMs are needed for load balancing,
statistics, torrent storage, the proxy site on port 80 and
controller functions.

The system operates using 182 GB of RAM and 94 GPU cores, with
total storage capacity of 620 GB, which are not used in full,
actually. Considering the scale of The Pirate Bay website, these
characteristics are quite modest.
One of the secrets of the modern day TPB is that the commercial
cloud providers hosting the torrent site have no idea that the
PTB is among their clients. The load balancer VM that funnels all
the traffic to other TPB virtual servers masks their activities,
which means none of the IP-addresses of the cloud hosting
providers are publicly linked to TPB. This makes the new TPB
virtually ‘raid-proof’ and very hard for police to track it down.
There are no more physical servers to be seized, too, as happened
in 2006, when Swedish police raided TPB’s hosting company,
seizing everything from servers to fax machines and blank CDs.

Despite occasional difficulties that hit the service from time to
time, there have been no major breakdowns recently and no agency
has attempted to shut the torrent site down.

It is true that cloud servers can be disconnected like any
physical server, but even in that case restoration of the
operation is much easier than before and services can be restored
from a different provider relatively quickly.

Still, The Pirate Bay remains The Pirate Bay, and this name is
widely known among registrars as the root of evil, burning
through five separate domain names the last year alone. But that
doesn’t dampen the spirits of the TPB team, as operators have
dozens of alternative domain names waiting in the wings.

Two of TPB’s original founders, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter
Sunde, are currently serving terms in prison and TPB has posted a
banner asking visitors to send their support to the site’s
founders.

“Show your support by sending them some encouraging mail!
Gottfrid is only allowed to receive letters, while Peter gladly
receives books, letters and vegan candy.”

When Svartholm and Sunde are out of jail, they’ll find that the
rules of the pirate game have changed – and most probably in
their favor.